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July 1999

Lillian Pitt, Tom Rudd and Margo McCafferty

Lillian Pitt, a Warm Springs/Yakima/Wasco native artist will headline an exhibition with fellow Oregon artists Tom Rudd, of Seneca heritage, and his partner, painter/printmaker Margo McCafferty at Jeffrey Moose Gallery, 1333 5th Avenue, Rainier Square, from July 1st through August 7th. The exhibition will open with a reception on Friday, July 2nd from 5:30 to 8:30 PM. Ms. Pitt and Mr. Rudd will speak about their work and careers at 6:30 PM.

Lillian Pitt who lives in Portland, Oregon and was a recipient of the Governor's Award of the Oregon Arts Commission, is known nationally and internationally for her Raku and Anagama fired ceramic masks and "Shadow Spirit" totem images based on traditional symbols and spirits of her Columbia River ancestors. Pitt also creates mixed media installations from natural materials which call in spirit energies and act as memorials to her ancestors, human, plant and animal. One recurring image, "She Who Watches", is based on a Columbia River petroglyph which represents the last of the Woman Chiefs before Coyote, the trickster, changed her into a rock to watch over her people and the Men Chiefs who followed her. This image is seen in mask form and in the faces of clay and silver jewelry pieces that the artist adds to her wide repertoire.

Her work has been exhibited and written about extensively in the U.S., New Zealand, Germany and Japan. In addition to the Oregon Governor's Award, Pitt's work has been commissioned by numerous museums and organizations and is in several collections, including the University of Washington's Burke Museum, the Sapporo City Hall, Sapporo, Japan and the prestigious Heard Museum in Phoenix, AZ. A retrospective of Ms. Pitt's work will open July 16th at the Museum at Warm Springs on her native Warm Springs reservation in Oregon.

Sculptor/graphic artist Tom Rudd has deep Seneca roots in New York State, but, as the artist says, some of his work "...doesn't have a feather on it", although it may allude to his roots in a subtle way. Rudd is a stone carver who works in basalt, andesite, limestone and Carrara marble and refers to ancient tribal objects using oversized forms of ladles, bowls, knife blades and arrowheads as points of departure. He also creates installations which juxtapose animal and archeological forms with elements from architecture and formal gardening. Rudd collaborates with his partner, painter Margo McCafferty to produce technically tricky but visually soothing and richly colored reduction linocuts focusing on landscape.

Tom Rudd
"Ladle 199"
1999
marble
8"x24"x9

Margo McCaffery creates extraordinary miniaturized worlds from the floor of the old growth forest in combinations of oil paint and dry pigment. Her visions focus on stumps, masses of roots and little clumps of life like beehives and lichen clusters: all the thing that combine to hold the forest together but which we rarely notice. Her works range from precious in scale (8"x8") to mantle size (36"x40"). She creates the drafts for the linocut images which Rudd then cuts from the linocut blocks. Ms. McCafferty received her BA in Art from Western State College in Monmouth Oregon , where she earned a spot in Who's Who Among American Colleges and Universities, and an MFA from Arizona State in Tempe.

Tom Rudd and Margo McCafferty
"Poverty Flats" (flood series) 1997
reduction linocut
18"x23.5"

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